Mapping a field of social force: The Swiss national security expert community.

In a social theory perspective, social actors produce and draw on collective ideations to make sense of the world, and to situate their practices therein. Seen from a critical vantage point however, the establishment of such ideations is often not the product of very inclusive or 'democratic' elaboration efforts - depending on the empirical issue-area in question, certain actors tend to stand in considerably more privileged positions than others to authoritatively define and prescribe specific collective ideations. Based on questionnaire and interview data, this paper draws on Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the field to illustrate and analyse the distribution of such authorities in the production of national security rationales in what I call the 'field of Swiss national security professionals': What governmental, partisan and civil society actors are being recognised as valid authorities of national security? How is national insecurity being defined, what foreign policy implications are being professed, and what 'ideational positions' do these different actors seize in these two interrelated debates? And last but not least, layering the two previous discussions atop each other, to what extent are the recognised authorities actually successful in imposing their national security views on the field's remainder? By determining the uneven recognised expert authority that different actors enjoy in contemporary Switzerland and by mapping and contrasting the different ideational positions adopted by them, the paper seeks to answer these questions and with it, to contribute a first sketch of the social and ideational power relations at play in the field of the Swiss national security professionals. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]